Performing Monument: Future Warnings

ARTICLES Performing Monument: Future Warnings Shalon Webber-Heffernan there is no linear time only strategic remembering1 This article explores two disparate, yet similar case studies that both disrupt linear versions of history through temporal and performative counter-monument interventions. It traces how two public art works re-write particular historical scripts by intervening into public memory and through complicating historiographical national narratives. First, I examine a contemporary socially engaged land art installation at the US/México border entitled Repellent Fence (2015), which drew critical attention to the Indigeneity upon which borders and trade policies have been built in the first place. I examine the performance of this large-scale, short-term, two-mile-long collaborative monument erected by the interdisciplinary art collective Postcommodity, based in the United States Southwest.2 Second, I highlight an even more recent monument intervention by Toronto-based comedy-art duo Life of a Craphead3 and their performance action entitled King Edward VII Equestrian Statue Floating Down the Don River (2017) which sent a simulated colonial monument of King Edward VII and his bronze horse floating down the Don River. Through a comparative analysis of these two case studies, and a discussion and contextualization of historical monuments more broadly, I examine the ways in which public monuments perform hemispherically,4 and how interventionist performances create counter-narratives to dominant colonial histories, creating space for decolonial imagining. Both monuments in this essay interact and perform with material expressions of colonial power manifesting in distinct geographic locations (US/México border; Toronto/India). I illustrate how the monuments in each case perform as “scriptive things”5 of/for the nation, while also scripting human actions and beliefs about and around national narratives. The site-specific performance interventions in this article disrupt historical narratives via public monuments (both metaphorically and figuratively) and open up alternative discourses around the meanings and memories that make up and come to define the nation-state over time. Both examples problematize monuments which continue to memorialize violence and domination as well as ongoing colonial and imperial power. I also consider the ways in which these counter-monument interventions perform by producing traces of memory, circulating and documenting themselves within cultural memory, creating new ways to think of the future. Hauntings I begin by looking at monuments themselves to consider what possibilities they hold for future memory and for performance. Typically, monuments are statues, buildings, or other structures erected to commemorate famous or notable people, and events or sites that are of historical importance or interest. The term “monument” originally (etymologically) denoted a structure placed by, or over a grave in memory of the dead6 (*note: a memory of the dead). Interestingly, ______________________________________________________________________________ Shalon Webber-Heffernan is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. 76 Performance Matters 4.3 (2018): 76–90 • Performing Monument Webber-Heffernan “monument” also has etymological links to the verbs “remind,” “advise” and “warn.”7 This term is also popularly used to refer to something that is large in scale and importance as in “monumental”—something of extraordinary size and power. United States Library of Congress historian John Y. Cole wrote in his book on the architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, “a monument allows us to see the past thus helping us visualize what is to come in the future” (Cole and Reed 1997, 16). This is an interesting premise since so many monuments continue to celebrate and memorialize colonial figures (of the past). In this way, we do see one fragmented piece of the past circulating within the present, but we certainly do not see the whole historiographical story being memorialized or commemorated. Rather, a linear (colonial) story is remembered and perpetuated. As for Cole’s next point, how do monuments allow us to visualize what is to come in the future? There is an element of prophecy in his statement which leads me to believe that to see what is to come we must truly consider the agency and implications that these monuments have, and what they represent. Let’s return to the early etymological root of the word “monument”: “to advise or to warn.” Could monuments be performing a warning for the future? How do we come to recognize these historical spectres, these things that as Derrida claims, “elude us as spectators, most of all because we believe that looking is sufficient?” (1994, 11). What if we consider the ghostly reverberations of colonial monuments, following Tuck and Ree’s understanding of haunting as the “relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation” (2013, 642)? Haunting, they argue is “both acute and general; individuals are haunted, but so are societies” (642). How can we come to recognize these hauntings through the re-working of memories through interventionist performances with monuments? Derrida writes that a spectre “is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back” evoking a practice of “being-with ghosts.” This “coming back” involves a politics of memory, inheritance, and generations that call for speaking of certain others who are not present nor presently living, in the name of a justice that exceeds the law. In this way, to be just is to be responsible “beyond the living present in general—and beyond its simple negative reversal” (Derrida 1994, xix). Likewise, Avery Gordon remarks that “ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains” (2008, 22). What, why, and for whom do monuments perform? What stories do they tell us about the past, and how can relating to them (heeding their warnings) challenge linear historical narratives and future historiographies? Performances and rituals also occur around the objects/things/monuments which can become representational of colonial desires and hunger for particular knowledge;8 these customs perform history’s colonial residues through celebrations and ribbon cuttings, and they generate energy, respect and honorary status to past relics. The monument then becomes a kind of de facto archive from which history is projected and perceived, but history according to whom? Deep Time Jill Lane’s understanding of deep time frames how historical formations are articulated through complex geometry and temporality across geographies. Deep time becomes a way to “make visible the competing tensions—moving on a north-south and east-west axis of imperial settlement, anticolonial struggle and neocolonial domination that inform the histories of nation, community and identity” (2010, 115) and a way to reduce the thick conditioning of linear, cartographic thinking.9 Performance Matters 4.3 (2018): 76–90 • Performing Monument 77 Webber-Heffernan According to Lane, the Americas (or the hemispheric) “may be usefully engaged as a set of connected practices in deep time rather than as continental mass in uniform shape” (2010, 113). Reconnecting the Americas in this way reintegrates multiple national players into the neopolitical regimes of power and implicates Canada as well, since border crossing is the project of capital, labour, and imperialism.10 Hemispheric thinking around counter-monuments challenges our perception of the geographies that underwrite both the historical and the present in the Americas; specifically, making visible the “competing tensions . of imperial settlement, anticolonial struggle and neocolonial domination that inform the histories of nation, community and identity in the Americas” (Lane 2010, 115). Ruth Phillips asserts that a monument is a “deposit of the historical possession of power” (2012, 340), but that its memory cannot maintain a stable form over time. Similar to my analysis of the two examples outlined below, Phillips is also interested in the processes of how meanings and narrations of history around monuments alter over time, examining the ways in which monumental works of art become focal points for Indigenous peoples’ contestations of settler narratives of history. Both counter-monument performances outlined below intervene in settler constructions of monument and memory by revising “specific Canadian historical discourses that have silenced Indigenous memory” (Phillips 2012, 340). I travel now into my first example, a socially engaged land art monument at the US/México border. Postcommodity—Repellent Fence For three days in October 2015, the interdisciplinary arts collective Postcommodity launched their socially collaborative, temporary land art installation, Repellent Fence (Valla Repelente in Spanish). In collaboration with local communities on both sides of the border, institutional and government organizations, volunteers, and publics, the project culminated in the establishment of a fleeting, large-scale outdoor monument located near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. The two- mile-long ephemeral monument perpendicularly crossed the US/ México border and highlighted the politics of the border’s division of Indigenous nations, illuminating

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